Movie Make-out

Best Picture: No Country for Old Men
Director: Joel & Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men
Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood
Actress: Marion Cotillard for La Vie en Rose
Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem for No Country for Old Men
Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton

A complete list of winners can be found at the official Oscars website.

UPDATE: Here’s Marketa Irglova’s acceptance speech, for those who missed it, or who want to get a little misty all over again:

USA Today provides us with "the best of Jon Stewart" from last night’s ceremony. My favorite: "The Democrats do have an historic race going.… Normally, if you see a black man or a woman president, an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty."

The Associated Press reports that last night’s telecast was the least-watched Oscar ceremony ever, with a 21.9 rating and a 33 share. This was 14% lower than the previous least-watched ceremony ever, which had 33 million viewers.

(NBC taken down the SNL "I Drink Your Milkshake" sketch I’d embedded above, so here it is at the NBC site.)

This isn’t about movies, but this fake commercial from Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live appearance — the first post-strike episode — is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time:

Removed from YouTube at NBC’s request; click over to NBC.com to see it.

Don’t forget! We’re having a special Oscar night "After Party" show for The Triple Feature tonight, immediately following the Oscars. Tune in, talk with us about the upsets, the pleasant surprises, and how hot Cate Blanchett is!

For those of you who don’t know what The Triple Feature is, it’s an hour-long movie "talkcast" by myself, Tom Brazelton and Joe Dunn, LIVE every Monday night at 9:00 PM Central. It’s a lot of fun, and if you ever want to shout angrily at me about anything I’ve written here at Movie Make-out, that’s as good as place as any.

If you’re not able to listen to the live recording of the show, you can always listen to it here or at the Multiplex site using the Triple Feature widget (click the animated graphic in the sidebar), or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes.

Vantage Point

Directed by Pete Travis.
Starring Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt, Edgar Ramirez, and Saïd Taghmaoui. 

Other reviewers keep comparing the new thriller Vantage Point to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, and it’s bugging the shit out of me. Where Vantage Point backs up its storyline five times in order to cover the same 23 minute span in a different location, or from a different place in the crowd, Rashomon is four different versions of the same events. Each iteration in Vantage Point is not showing a different, subjective version, but a different aspect of a single, objective event: that’s not at all the same thing. This is not to say that Vantage Point is original, or intelligent, or good, however. Because it’s not.

The gimmick, while not inherently a bad idea, got on my nerves because the first couple of times the filmmakers employed it, because it didn’t really reveal anything new. The last two back-ups, however, at least took the action across the street or a few blocks away, and you finally felt that the story was moving forward — except that, ultimately, where it moved to was either so obvious or so stupid that it didn’t matter. (Hey, guess what? There’s a traitor on the Secret Service — and you can tell who it is from his second line, over an hour before the film finally reveals it to the audience. Can fictional spy movies stop having double agents in, like, every single movie? It’s annoying.)

The disappointing thing about Vantage Point is that even though the film is kind of brain dead, it had a brisk pace (in spite of the two early, extraneous back-ups), the actors were all very good, and the actiony bits were done well enough that I was enjoying the movie in spite of it all — not a lot, but a little — but the entire story comes to a head at one particular moment so unbelievable, so amazingly idiotic, that it completely undermines any of the enjoyment I had taken from the preceding 80-something-odd minutes. I have to venture into spoiler territory to properly comment on this much of the film, so consider yourself warned: when a little girl wanders out into traffic, the terrorist — who has just bombed a plaza filled with scores of people, personally shot one hostage, and killed another dozen or so by sending a suicide bomber off to his death as a diversion — is so concerned about this girl’s safety that he jerks the wheel of the ambulance he’s driving so hard that it causes it to roll. Perhaps my understanding of how terrorists’ minds work is not as strong as screenwriter Barry Levy’s, but I would think someone who’s already killed any number of innocent children to just turn her into a little red smear on the road, rather than jeopardize his entire plan.

There is an extent to which films like this can coast by on a good cast and well-done chases (the film equivalent of looks and charm), but when the resolution of a film hinges entirely upon a mass murderer giving even the slightest shit about a child who can only be described as Movie Stupid, there’s just no getting past that.

Vantage Point is rated PG-13 and opened on Friday, February 23, 2008. After seeing the trailer for the past six months, I’m happier about the idea that I won’t need to see it in front of half the movies I watch than about having seen the movie.

IGN Movies has posted a trailer for The Fall, Tarsem’s follow-up to 2000’s the obnoxiously idiotic Jennifer Lopez The Cell, whose sole redeeming quality, other than looking pretty, was including a clip from Fantastic Planet. As expected, The Fall looks visually spectacular, and there may be an interesting story in there somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I can tell what it’s about from the trailer, other than a bed-ridden guy telling a little girl a story in order to get her to do a favor for him. The movie has been sitting on the shelf for over a year now, it seems: here’s a review from The Hollywood Reporter from way back in September, 2006. The film will finally get a limited release sometime this March.

This one’s been out for a while, but I’ve only just come across it: Apple Movie Trailers has the trailer for actor-turned-first-time-director Richard Roxburgh’s Romulus, My Father, starring Eric Bana and Franka Potente. Based on the memoir by Raimond Gaita, this one looks like a rather touching drama. It will begin a very small limited release on February 29, but is apparently already available on HDNet Video On Demand, according to the film’s official site. (If you’re interested, there’s more about the film at the official Australian site.)

While most of the press about the Oscars in the mainstream media are all about the glitz, speculation about who’s going to win, and how hard it must be for Jon Stewart and his fresh-off-the-picket-line writers to whip up a show in a week, there’s still the occasional story that isn’t basically a bunch of bullshit. Here are a few that are worth your time:

USA Today has an excellent article on how the Oscars, either through platform releases or home video, have changed the way "modest" (independent) films make money. The Hollywood Reporter has a shorter article, more specifically about this year’s nominees.

Reuters covers some of the oversights in this year’s Best Foreign Language Film category. One very surprising omission that the article names was the European Film Awards’ European Film 2007" (their Best Picture equivalent) and Golden Globe Best Foreign Film nominee 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days; while I have not seen it, myself, it made so many critics’ best of 2007 lists that it seemed like a shoo-in for a nod, at least — yet it was nowhere to be found.

UPDATED (2/24): Make the "Oscar coverage with listening to"; NPR’s Morning Edition radio show gave us this run-down of the nominees for Best Dramatic Score from film music expert Andy Trudeau, whose pick for Best Score (Atonement) lines up with my own.

NPR and Wired have a pair of interesting pieces on the snubbing of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, who was widely thought to be all but guaranteed a nomination for Best Dramatic Score, for his amazing soundtrack to There Will Be Blood, only to have it ruled ineligible, along with Eddie Vedder’s score for Into the Wild.

JoBlo also provides us with links to this year’s Best Original and Adapted Screenplay, which is very kind of them.

Related posts: Oscar-nominated shorts now available from iTunes,  Review: The Counterfeiters is the real deal, Review: 2008 Oscar-nominated Live Action Short Films, Review: 2008 Oscar-nominated Animated Short Films, Top 10 Favorite Films of 2007

AICN has a new, unconfirmed report that Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Brick) is in the running for Tetsuo in the upcoming Akira adaptation — which, like the Leo casting, is not something I’m holding my breath over. Or terribly excited about, if it does turn out to be true. I really liked Gordon-Levitt in Brick (despite not being quite as fond of the movie), but… how about casting some Japanese people, maybe? Call me crazy.

A Wall Street Journal (?!) article about media companies starting up in-house video game divisions in order to keep the booming VG market’s profits unceremoniously gives away the premise for the upcoming Toy Story 3 movie from Pixar. The film will arrive — in 3D, following 3D re-releases of the previous two — in 2010. Some of you will recall that Disney had a Toy Story 3 of their own in development a while back, which was scrapped immediately after they acquired Pixar and appointed Lasseter as Chief Creative Officer, with the statement that "If the film is made, it will be done by Lasseter and the other creators of the original film." This new Toy Story 3 is being helmed by Lee Unkrich, editor of the first film and co-director of the second, from a screenplay by Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine).

E! Online reports that Linday Lohan is joining the cast of the upcoming Jack Back Renaissance Faire comedy, Ye Olde Times.

Related post: Warner Brothers set to make Akira two-parter (updated)